Chewing peppermint to obscure the incriminating caraway on my breath, I found Truman and Averil in the kitchen with rolled-up sleeves. We were not nearly through with sorting and reclaiming this house for ourselves, and the kitchen remained the most dauntingly inhabited diorama of my mother’s Gestalt. Though overflowing with comestibles, this had always been one of those mysterious sculleries whose pantry dropped cans, whose fridge bulged baggies, and whose freezer required a chair against the door to keep it from popping open, where you couldn’t find a thing to eat.
We’d attacked the refrigerator the day before, and once we cleared out the fungus-furred yellow squash, liquefied lettuce, separated mayonnaise and crystallized strawberry jam there was nothing salvageable remaining besides a single jar of dubious peanut butter. After we scoured the ice-box with cleanser and propped it open to air I had gazed into that expanse of pristine plastic, for the first time guiltlessly glad on some account that my mother was dead. My whole life that refrigerator had been crammed full of stale margarine crumbed with burnt toast, cling-filmed half-cups of overcooked rice, and imploding green peppers sagging into the lower drawers’ ad hoc vegetable soup. I had never been at liberty to thunk anything into the bin without suffering, ‘Why, that’s my good meatloaf!’ to send her scraping diffidently at a glaucous brown scab. There was always one half-inch chunk of a Macintosh that was ‘perfectly good’, leaving me to question my mother’s compromised version of perfection, and if I ever drew her attention to the fact that though apples by the bushel had indeed been cheaper than by the bag but these were nine months old, we would suffer reproof by pie.
In fact, my mother had not been a bad cook, but she was so consumed with employing ingredients that ‘needed using’ that she’d contaminate five dollars’ worth of lasagne with a handful of ammoniated mushrooms that cost ten cents. When she cut fresh pineapple, it so grieved her to slice off any of the fruit with the rind that she left the spines in, and dessert was like chewing your way out of a prison camp. This curious inclination to sacrifice the whole for the part—to leave mould on one side of the cheddar, to gouge out only half the tomato rot, or bake an otherwise gorgeous gingerbread with fermented molasses—must have had larger implications for her life. Had she been a Civil War surgeon, she couldn’t have brought herself to chop off any of the ‘perfectly good’ leg and what’s wrong with leaving just a little infection and all her patients would have died from gangrene.
Having so recently exterminated the refrigerator, I’d given her culinary edicts some thought: those imperatives both to save and to not-waste—subtly different laws with subtly different pitfalls. Saving became hoarding for its own sake; misers died with mattressfuls of cash, or, in my mother’s case, a full row of spiced peach halves, which she adored, in the back of the pantry. But the upside of saving is a sense of preciousness. It gave my mother more pleasure to retain those jars than to dispatch them. She savoured potential, just as Truman treasured a stocked larder. I liked that, the keeping; it was a belief in the future, if misguided, since the peach halves had survived her.
Not-wasting was all the more rooted in preciousness. How could I fault that? Only for being a trap. Not-wasting was a bondage. Say the zucchini is sufficiently geriatric that when you pick it up with one hand it falls in half. Yet if you chuck it you become a person who throws ‘perfectly good’ food away and that is not the way you want to think of yourself, so into the stir-fry it goes, even if you have to ladle in the zucchini with a spoon. My mother served dinner, literally. Food was a responsibility, a ward she was determined to do right by, and as long as her charges were helpless she was a good mother. I can’t count the times at a restaurant that she’d been given an absurdly large portion, when she was already too heavy and would feel bloated later, and still she could not, could not bring herself to leave so much as a morsel on her plate. She’d force herself through to the last forkful even to the point of nausea, because she did not understand that it was there for her and not the other way round. My father felt superior to the inanimate and my mother was its love-slave.
However, my mother’s sense of the precious beat the buy-another-one world in which a fresh sponge meant nothing. I enjoyed swabbing coffee grounds with bright yellow virgin foam. I wouldn’t want to start a new sponge every day.
My parents never resigned themselves to the fact that anything wore out or spoiled. All was forever: from stereo speakers whose shot woofers my father refused to hear buzz to ‘30% More’ saltines that Mother would ‘crisp up’ (burn) once the crackers were soggy. The night before, Truman and I had finally put to pasture the pepper grinder we’d wrestled since I was five, which had strained the tendons in even his arms for a weary baptism of imperceptible ash. It would never have occurred to them in a million years to buy a new grinder. They had bought one, with the finality of marriage.
Possibly this belief in the immortality of the inanimate was a stand-in for belief in their own, the refusal to recognize degeneration of foodstuffs commensurate with my mother’s conviction that she had been born beautiful and could not, therefore, be fat. Stubbornly, she would deny loss on even the smallest scale since if ‘perfectly good’ brinjal pickle could acquire a suspicious fizz behind your back you entered an untrustworthy universe where romances could sour and sons could go bad. She refused to live on so unreliable a planet, and I couldn’t resist a sort of dumb admiration for someone able to fly so magnificently in the face of fact. The pickle was from their trip to India eight years earlier and it was ‘special’ and it was therefore fine. Reality had nothing to do with it.
Consequently, my mother was a compulsive economies-of-scale shopper, for because she did not acknowledge the concept of the perishable there was nothing that wouldn’t keep. It always amazed me that when her gallon can of olive oil went rancid she couldn’t taste it. She would stash the same can in the pantry for five years, rust crawling across the catty-cornered punctures, until her dressings made me gag. If she could taste rancid oil, some override function intervened: it was more important to my mother to maintain her belief in the permanence of all things than to toss edible salad. Hers was a religious problem, or strength—my mother’s obliviousness to corruption, her stoic Protestant palate, was a tribute to her faith in life everlasting; our every meal was a sacrament. Jesus in our family did not, alas, turn water into wine, but resurrected our vegetable drawer.
It was before the cathedral of eternal life that Truman and Averil now stood, stepped fearfully back with its great door agape: the awesome stand-up freezer. Truman had unplugged it, like the villain in Star Trek who turns off life support for space travellers in suspended animation. The baggies were just beginning to glisten, frost yielding to that treacherous world of decay that my mother spent her life defying. On the floor yawned two heavy-duty garbage bags, which I expected to prove insufficiently capacious for the ransacking we had planned.
‘What took you so long?’ Truman fretted when I walked in. ‘I don’t see how you can bear that rat’s nest. And I thought you always say he’s so boring.’
‘Mordecai is endlessly entertaining, if often at his own expense,’ I said.
‘Anyway, you’re just in time for a walk down memory lane.’
‘Memory lane—’ I poked at a fibrillated rump steak on the counter that had freeze-dried to umber with a distinctive greenish cast ‘—in winter. Bloody hell, do we have to do this now?’
‘That’s what you’ve said all week.’ Truman prised a tupperware container from the upper shelf with the crowbar he’d marshalled for the job. “‘Feta walnut pâté”,’ he read out. ‘Corlis—when did you make that?’
‘Ten years ago.’
I was not hyperbolizing; I meant ten years ago. When he prised off the lid, the frost had grown high and interlaced, reminiscent of that remarkable green fungus which had thrived on the yellow squash. He plonked it in the bag.
‘But that’s my good feta and walnut dip!’ I exclaimed, once more the imitation too true for comfort. ‘You’re not going to throw it away!’
‘Gross,’ said Averil, exploring another corpse in cling-film. ‘Is this fish, or fibreglass?’
‘Three important heels of bread from 1977,’ Truman announced, ker-chunk.
‘That would make perfectly good french toast!’ I cried.
‘I don’t believe it,’ Truman groaned, fingers grown ruddy. ‘Rice and cheese balls!’
I had helped my mother with a party, when? I must have been at UNC at Chapel Hill, and we’d rashly multiplied a recipe so fecund that the rice balls seemed to reproduce of their own accord, as if by cell division. Poor Truman ate those gluey fried dumplings for weeks—but not, it seemed, all of them. The second shelf was devoted entirely to neat packages of icy brown orbs, nesting nefariously like an invasion of aliens waiting to hatch. Just then I had a brief nightmarish vision of what might happen to our house if we allowed the undead to enter the room-temperature dimension. I cautioned Truman he should cart these bags to the kerb before their contents began crawling up the stairs to our beds, tongues of unnaturally preserved lasagne noodles trailing crenulated worms along the carpet.
‘A quarter cup of chilli con carne, 1974…’ Truman rooted. ‘One half hot cross bun—’
‘The Easter rising,’ I said. ‘1916.’
‘One ball pie dough scraps, one dollop leftover carrot cake icing, and—what’s this—salmon surprise.’
‘You know what she did, don’t you,’ I explained to Averil. ‘When some yummy titbit in the fridge was turning to science fair project? Normal people throw it out, Mother put it in the freezer.’
‘She believed in cryogenics,’ Truman posited. ‘Maybe she was hoping that over the years they’d come up with a cure for cancerous casseroles.’
‘In the later years it became obsessive,’ I went on, taking over while Truman breathed on his stiff red hands. ‘They lived to freeze. A prune cake would barely cool before Mother was wrapping it happily into little squares and nudging them maniacally by the egg whites. Egg whites…Egg whites…Egg whites…’ I threw four successive plastic containers into the first bag, now full.
‘I’m going to toss this,’ said Truman, tying it up. ‘I swear this bag was starting to move.’
When he returned we were down to the serious archaeological back layers, which had melded into a solid wall of petrified leftovers, the kind of Arctic dig in which you discover missing evolutionary links. Troom hoisted the crowbar again. ‘Corlis,’ he enquired offhandedly, using a hammer on the crowbar to chink the gooseberry crumble my mother only made once—when I was in tenth grade. ‘What happened, at Mortadello’s?’
‘Oh, a lot of bitching about the ACLU, of course. Funny, too—most Yippie sons would be carping that their fathers didn’t leave bequests to bastions of social justice. You can’t win.’
‘Uh-huh. And that’s what you told him?’
I shrugged and picked shrivelled peas from the floor. ‘More or less.’
‘What about the house?’ asked Averil squarely. ‘Will he let us buy him out, or not?’
‘Ah—’ I was getting very thorough about the peas. ‘Not exactly.’
Truman hit the crowbar again with the hammer, hard, and a glacier of clam chowder gave way. ‘What do you mean, “not exactly”?’
‘I guess I mean—’ I scooped some frost from the floorboards. ‘No. He won’t. He’s going ahead with that partition suit.’
‘What the heck!’ A chunk of cooked frozen oatmeal skidded across the floor.
‘Would you watch what you’re doing with that crowbar? I think you need an acetylene torch.’
‘But why?’
I muttered, ‘Mordecai’s more complicated than you think.’
I took over from Truman so he could thaw again. Spanish noodles, pork barbecue, lamb curry—all my old favourite dishes had paled to the same morbid mauve. This was Mother’s idea of preservation?
‘All he’s ever cared about is money. What’s complicated?’
I noted with some surprise myself, ‘He’s sentimental.’
‘Mother and Father didn’t like him, I don’t like him, and you don’t like him, do you? Do you?’
In the crook of the freezer door, I was physically in a corner. ‘Not much.’ I qualified tentatively, ‘I guess.’
‘So what’s to be sentimental about?’
‘I did what I could, OK? The fact is, if the house goes on the market there’s a chance the price will go higher than the appraiser’s valuation and Mordecai knows that. Yes, he wants his money, but he wants as much of it as possible. That’s why he’ll force us to advertise, and it’s not my fault!’ I had made all this up on the spot.
‘OK, OK—then why are you so mad?’
I had started hacking at the ice mural of dinners we didn’t finish and hadn’t enjoyed much the first time, wondering if the impulse wasn’t to save most what you never really had in the first place. The montage of my motley childhood was in this layer so welded and blurred and twisted with interweaving plastic wrap failing to protect tuna bakes from the ravages of salvation that none of the dishes was recognizable any longer, or distinguishable from one another—just one big gunky smorgasbord of keeping elbows off the table and wanting to go play. Oh, she’d saved all right, but saved what? A life of freezing. That was what my mother did. She froze.
If I was angry at being jammed once more between two brothers, at that very moment I was furious with the woman who lodged me there. Like the sponge, this freezer was a point of view. Beyond rice-and-cheese balls, my parents had stored their courtship by the ice cubes, wedged their lives together and their first kiss between the chopped spinach and desiccated chuck steak, so that at the end of this project I half expected to find the two of them embraced over stiff slices of pumpkin pie. For my parents had not been brave enough to live in a world of spoilage and catastrophe, decline and obsolescence. Their marriage was in the freezer. Their versions of their children—The Bulldozer, The Scatterbrain, The Tender Flower—were in the freezer. The world itself—where grown children now have sex and drink ‘the hard stuff’, but not in their house—was in the freezer. The fixed tenets of Heck-Andrews—that we Loved Each Other, that we had a Happy Family—were in the freezer. So I was angry over ten-year-old feta walnut pâté because I’d have preferred warm-blooded parents who had rows and fell out instead of a couple rigidly holding hands like the top of a wedding cake preserved for eternity by the family-pack pork.
‘You know,’ said Averil, retrieving a casualty and sniffing, ‘this might still be all right—’
I grabbed the pinkish chunk and hurled it back in the sack. ‘Don’t even think about it.’ Averil didn’t have the constitution for this work.
Eugenia Hadley Hamill met Sturges Harcourt McCrea when she was twenty-one at a Young Democrats conference in Richmond, Virginia. He was President and she was Secretary—too perfect, for 1952. Loosely speaking, she remained his secretary for the duration, dutifully remembering appointments while the Great Man championed racial justice. (How appropriate that my father never appeared for a plaintiff in a sex discrimination case.) That there was never any question of equality between my parents probably made the relationship possible.
Initially, her looks would have nearly evened the balance with her husband—my mother was stunning. My father received flattering lambastes in conservative papers, but my mother got salesmen falling all over themselves to be helpful when she bought a hat. She sported generous hips, but a tiny waist and neat, close breasts. Over the years her knees got a little bulgy, but otherwise her legs were solid, and she had trim, diminutive feet. Her skin was a warm olive that didn’t sunburn, which I inherited, while Truman was stuck with my father’s freckling hairless white-bread complexion that seared and peeled with a vengeance. Only Mordecai, however, got her hair—a thick and lustrous mahogany like the pricey woods he favoured, with a natural curl and tendency to form ringlets around the temples after a light sweat. Mordecai bound that hair tightly away, but Eugenia Hamill had made the most of being a brunette, sweeping shocks back from her forehead where they would tendril free from hairpins down her neck.
Most riveting of all, of course, was her face. Even in crinkled old photographs she radiated with a smile like an open window, and chocolate eyes that simmered in the light, twin pots of dark fudge glistening on a stove. Mordecai got those, too—her first-born was treated to the whole package, so that when the second and third came along it was as if there was less left for us genetically. But in my older brother those eyes had a muddier, more conniving stir, less like fudge sauce than brownie batter. They were flatter and more suspicious, and when they went pellucid it was never with desire but always with self-pity. Even in my mother’s eyes you found a popple of mischief before she married, which by the way completely disappeared. All that church-going and oatmeal-freezing is hard on mischief.
In that animal way some women have, at twenty-one Eugenia Hamill marked my father as a male destined for the head of the herd. You’d have needed an eye for it, since I couldn’t see anything auspicious about him in their wedding pictures. My father at twenty-five was a geek. He may have been president of the Young Democrats, but he cut his hair barbarously short so his ears stuck out from his head. Acne. He looked gawky and awkward, no chest, and the features in his face had not yet settled; they didn’t seem to know where to be, as if at a reception where they weren’t sure how to mingle and kept wandering off for a glass of Hawaiian punch. Were you stuck at cocktail hour with Mr Sincerity here, first of all he wouldn’t drink; and second, he wouldn’t let go, but would corner you to dissect Adlai Stevenson’s strategy for derailing McCarthy while everyone else was swooning about James Dean and tapping their toes to Chubby Checker. He wouldn’t dance, or remember jokes. The fact is, if I met my own father at a party I’d have ditched him in a minute for the guy with a sense of humour and a martini on the other side of the room.
My father may have been a swat, but even then—this is what my mother spotted—he must have been driven by a ruthless personal ambition that he disguised decorously, and with timely creativity, as burning social conscience. Their first few dates were spent picketing lunch counters, or leafleting for integrated education and then fishing their discarded hand-outs from black cotton Virginian mud. To give Sturges credit, with a woman from the midwest for whom the segregated South was the evil empire, a diner with Whites Only restrooms was a much more inspired locale to get her to clutch his hand than in the back rows of Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman.
My father must have had some cachet, a stalwart lefty in the days when it cost you, who had taken two years off after a history degree at Davidson to volunteer for—ever the sacred cow—the ACLU. Meanwhile he threw himself into the election campaign that so broke his heart that Truman Adlai had it to thank for his middle name. Anti-McCarthy, anti-nuclear testing, later to troop after Martin Luther King and help found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Sturges McCrea was in on the ground floor of all the noble sentiments that are now derisively dismissed as ‘politically correct’. My brothers may have resented their father’s staking claim to the big liberal issues not just because these were used to bludgeon the boys into submission, but because so little largesse was left for them. Truman did not champion the black and the poor but porch mouldings; Mordecai had thrown in his lot with high fidelity of only the most technical variety. If Eugenia Hadley Hamill had met either of her own sons at a Young Democrats conference, after politely permitting Truman to regale her about the distinguishing elements of Second Empire architecture, and Mordecai to extol the components of his last recording studio, she’d have politely excused herself for finger sandwiches, leaving them both to goon mournfully after her as had so many young men in her youth.
I do not question that falling in love with Sturges McCrea was the biggest event in my mother’s life. Before Sturges, she had tolerated countless suitors, gracious and considerate of their feelings, though firmly offended when their hands crept over her knee. But I figure when Sturges so much as grazed her blouse she couldn’t breathe. My mother must have had a libido the size of South Dakota; though virgins when they married, for years after they were so self-congratulatory over their restraint that there must have been a fair fire to contain. They were apart during much of their courtship, hailing from different states, and she lived for his letters—stiff, formal protestations of undying love with a lot of God thrown in that we were still unearthing around the house. That his prose was stilted my mother no doubt overlooked, sweeping to her bedroom and throwing herself on the bed to hoard his onionskin as she would later stockpile Vidalias until they were black. The door locked behind her, she would pen a reply in that liquid, Palmer-method script of hers that made even ‘ketchup’ and ‘light bulbs’ look exotic magneted to the refrigerator door when I was young.
I had bosomed my share of billets doux as well. Yet she never gave me credit for the full-blown passion that enveloped her on her Iowa bedspread, and it was her very insistence that rapture remain foreign to me, her possessiveness over love itself, that first suggested to me that she was nervous of keeping it on her own account.
She did fall in love with him. I believe that. Their romance was the real McCoy at the start. But I think being happy must be a thoroughly petrifying experience. The first thing that seems to occur to people high as kites is that any time now the wind might die and there they’ll be, torn in a tree. Exhilaration seems to arrive in tandem with the threat of despair; passion arrives hand in hand with the prospect of indifference. Maybe when you feel anything strongly the sensation becomes definitive of the state in which you feel otherwise. This dark alternative must have smacked my mother up-side the head. She was in love with my father, and the idea that the honeymoon might one day come to an end was patently intolerable.
I never met the woman in those early snaps. In all the pictures of our family where I feature even as a baby, her smile is no longer an open window but a shut one with the air conditioner on. Through the years, too, you can see her eyes change; they contract into themselves, shielded, a little blank. I’ve experimented with putting my hand over the cheesecake lower half of her face, and isolated from all those teeth her eyes look pained. The burden of incessant acting when she really hadn’t a knack for it must have gradually taken it out of her. For well before I was born she had abandoned the precariousness of really being in love with my father for the surety of pretending to be.
No, I am not one more whinging offspring, begotten of two people who reviled one another, and now irremediably scarred. On the contrary, we were instructed from first grade on that my parents had the most wonderful marriage in the whole world, and that ‘we should be so lucky’, my mother would caution, to barely approach in our own tawdry adulthoods the elation of their ethereal communion. We were informed repeatedly that whom you married was the biggest decision of your life and that in the history of the universe never had this choice been more inspired than in our own house. We were the privileged witnesses to Wedded Bliss, whose literal expression was described as so ‘beautiful’ and so involved with Jesus that I always pictured the two of them kneeling in prayer by the bedside before they Did It. At any rate, hats off to my father for being able to get it up in such a sanctuary of a bridal chamber that their windows were stained glass, while beatified in rhetoric that urges most people to burst into the doxology.
Consequently, whenever my mother heard about another of my relationships biting the dust (though I shielded her from most of them), her comfort ran that my ‘problem’ was having ‘such a remarkable father’ and being the issue of ‘such a spectacular union’ that no one I found could measure up. Somehow this explanation regularly failed to console.
My parents were condescending about Truman’s marriage, as if it were his sweet little boy’s attempt to imitate their Tristan and Isolde, as if upstairs he and Averil were playing Doctor. My father expressed his contempt by never mentioning Averil, as if to do so would be vulgar; my mother by being too encouraging. Truman maintained at the time that he and Averil opted for a brief civil ceremony with me as their only witness because they were practical, and didn’t like fuss. I think my parents had made them feel ashamed.
In any family there may be one worm, a single wriggle of corruption from which every other foulness spreads, and in the McCrea case the source-lie was that my parents were happily married. The irony? They were happily married. They just didn’t believe it. They were afraid that, like the brinjal pickle, it might not keep, and so they turned a perfectly serviceable relationship into a religion and thereby into a fraud. Imagine how disconcerting this was for small children. We were told their marriage was as good as they come; yet there was something horribly hollow about it and so marriages didn’t come very good. What they offered as promising merely depressed us.
If the stagy fakery that invaded my mother’s behaviour had been restricted to her ‘telephone voice’—she never answered the phone with anything less than, ‘Hello, Eugenia Hamill McCrea speaking’—and that fossilized smile for strangers, I could have forgiven her as a socially formal woman covering for the fact that she was shy. But it was in private she was at her most false. And mind, she was a woeful actress, so that when she squeezed us for a beat too long and recited, ‘I luv you, kiddo’ we would squirm and refuse to meet her eyes out of the same raging embarrassment of watching Vivien Leigh overdo Scarlett O’Hara. And this is the bugbear: she did love us. My mother loved us. But she never, never said so when she was feeling it at the time.
My mother imitated her own feelings, that is, feelings she did truly stash somewhere. The interesting question is why, if she loved her husband and her children, did she have to pretend to? Why, if she was genuinely attracted to the man, was she moved to contrive loud, giggling recitations of amour with the bedroom door carefully cracked open so we could hear?
This may be why I get nostalgic for the days Mordecai issued his declarations of independence in our foyer while I secured my balcony view. The word ‘fuck’ was a primitive trigger for my mother’s visceral acrimony, and it was only when she was lashing I could trust her: this was at least Real Mother. Frightening as she may have been while screeching at her eldest below me that his girlfriend was a slut, I cannot exaggerate my relief at hearing her voice both lowered and hitting harmonic squeals like an actual person trying to express an emotion she was undergoing right then.
As I posited to Truman, Eugenia McCrea was not a contented woman and she never knew it. Father may have been happily married (though obliviously—like a verdict he was not planning to appeal, the merger was simply decided) and Mother told herself she was. She never got around to the genuine article in the exhaustion of manufacturing a plausible mock-up. She was like a woman who lets her yard roses wither because she’s always indoors watering the plastic ones.
In some ways a wholesomeness entered Heck-Andrews when my father died, a death whose survival had been my mother’s greatest fear: at long last she had permission to be miserable. If anything, the trouble became that she wasn’t as ecstatically miserable as she’d have liked. North Carolinian weather remained mercifully clement and the Russell Stover’s Dark Selection insidiously seductive, and how relaxing it must have been to stop hamming it up.
Again, I don’t mean my mother didn’t love my father, but she was afraid she didn’t—afraid to brave that one terrible moment when she had to entertain the notion that she did not. Then she’d have had to be truly bored with him when he went on about a case she didn’t care about, truly irritated when he glued the coffee cup handles with epoxy glopping down the sides—it’s not all it’s cracked up to be, having real emotions. I know that with the most dazzling men there have been times I’ve been terribly bored and I am sure they’ve been equally bored with me. Then much of life is indeed boring and that’s nobody’s fault. The most positive thing I ever heard Truman say about his own marriage is that up in the dovecot he and Averil didn’t always have anything to say to each other, but he refused to fabricate Topics simply to convince himself they were so suited to one another that they never ran out of conversation. Myself, I’d been in the very arms of a beloved and felt absolutely nothing, when the only choice was whether to admit I felt nothing or to lie. The hardest thing about loving someone is those moments when you’re not. And there are inevitably such moments; the amount of trust required to get past them is stupendous. My mother didn’t have it. For all her dogged Presbyterianism, her confidence in the durability of produce, my mother was a woman of quite tenuous faith.
Take family vacations. We were obliged to Have Fun. So we’d be wheeling through the Blue Ridge Mountains and my father would veer into an overlook for more exciting slides of rust-coloured bumps. My mother would exclaim breathily, ‘Sturges! It’s so—exquisite!’ and immediately indicate that the vista of turning leaves was completely lost on her and that she probably needed to pee. A little later, she would chirp, ‘Aren’t we having a wonderful time!’ and that was the point we knew she was nervous we were having a rotten time, as—after enough cooing about what a wonderful time we were having—would certainly be the case. She would fill the remainder of our holiday remarking on how we would look back on this time as so ‘special’ when what she was condemning us to remember was her saying over and over how we’d look back on this time as so ‘special’. A vacation’s one shameful redemption was our mean imitations of Mother behind her back.
Part of this removal in my family was relentless interpretation—no fact got left alone just to be itself—so that my mother’s death by heart attack is left to me to find potent. Surrounded by photographs of my father—she would have liked that, she might have designed it, perhaps she did. But she wouldn’t like my reconstruction one bit.
I see her sifting though the snapshots, as she’d done many times before. She gazed at my father’s lopsided mug for the camera, and she felt—stricken, her heart attacked by his absence? No. My version? She felt nothing. One of those times. Nicht, nada, zip. Her mind wandered to lunch—yellow squash—though it was only ten. Here she was, smoothing photographs of her dead husband and she was thinking about squash—it must have killed her. My theory? It did kill her. She made herself cry. I know the sound: sobs forced from her lungs as if trying to dislodge a piece of popcorn—bad acting. Though no one else was in the room, most of her performances were for her own benefit. And the harder she pushed those sobs, the more she knew that she was faking. Whether she died from the exertions of fraud or the acknowledgement of fraud I couldn’t say, but my mother did not die in a state of grace. Maybe there is no more grotesque a betrayal of yourself —or of your husband: to parody your own passion. Up to the end she preferred the safety of pure if concocted grief to real loss mixing sordidly with squash.
On my mother’s wedding day, the one thing she wanted above all was to spend the rest of her life married to my father. Barring two years, that’s what she got. And she muffed it. She was so scared to permit the possibility for an instant that the romance wouldn’t last that she put it in the freezer, and I tried to tell her long ago that even the omnipotent freezer doesn’t keep things forever but gradually turns its charges tasteless, dry, and grey until preservation itself becomes a drawn-out crucifixion instead. Yet between the fickle if blood-warm treacheries of the perishable and the deceitful sureties of Freon she chose to put her heart on ice. And I am truly sorry. I imagine those two might, had they trusted their own ardour, made a reasonable pair.